Hi,

Thanks for the detailed analysis. I’m wondering if you factored in the cost of engineering time invested in this analysis, and how that affects the payback time (if at all).

Thanks!

Author here: this probably took a 2.5 days to put together, all in.

The first day was spent hacking together a new hot reloaded but this also fixed a lot of issues we’d had with the previous loader such as restarting into stale code, which was really harming people’s productivity. That was well worth even several days of effort really!

The second day I was just messing around with OpenAI to figure out how I’d do this analysis. We’re right now building an AI assistant for our actual product so you can ask it “how many times did I get paged last year? How many were out-of-hours? Is my incident workload increasing?” Etc and I wanted an excuse to learn the tech so I could better understand that feature. So for me, well worth investing a day to learn.

Then the article itself took about 4hrs to write up. That’s worth it for us given exposure for our brand and the way it benefits us for hiring/etc.

We trust the team to make good use of their team and allowing people to do this type of work if they think it’s valuable is just an example of that. Assuming I have a £1k/day rate (I do not) we’re still only in for £2.5k, so less than a single MacBook to turn this around.

They could also add in the advertising benefit of showing off some fun data on this site :)

But then they'd have to factor in the engineering time invested in the analysis of the analysis?

Zeno’s nihilism: nothing is worth doing because the mandatory analysis into whether something is worth doing or not takes infinite time.

I'm curious how you came to the conclusion the Max SKUs aren't much faster, the distributions in the charts make them look faster but the text below just says they look the same.

So can we assume the M3 Max offered little benefit because the workloads couldn’t use the cores?

Or the tasks maybe finished so fast that it didn’t make a difference in real world usage?

Great analysis! Thanks for writing it up and sharing.

Logistical question: did management move some deliverables out of the way to give you room to do this? Or was it extra curricular?

Hi, Thanks for the interesting comparison. What I would like to see added would be a build on a 8GB memory machine (if you have one available).